Hello! So, because releasing updates to 12-year-old games is cool, Afterlife: Rickard's Quest version 1.12 is now available to download, with some fairly large changes, as well as some fixes to a few bugs (including one issue that could cause the game to crash under some circumstances).

The biggest feature update is that game replays are now recorded automatically, and finally record the full length of the Act, rather than just a segment of it, which is definitely much more useful. Replay recording can be turned off in the game options, and both replays and custom Acts made with the Act Editor can now be saved to the Windows "Documents" folder instead of the local game folder, which is particularly useful for those whose Windows setup virtualizes game folders and hides your files away in a hidden user-directory.

As well as new features, this version makes some gameplay changes: the time limit for an Act is now just 7:00 (rather than 13:00 as before); collecting all balloons in an Act now only gives one additional Heart, but does so regardless of whether Rickard's balloon has already taken damage (so it's no longer strategically necessary to leave one balloon until needed); and there are no longer any Aspect powers in Realms for which the Crux has been collected.

Overall, this means that the game's difficulty is probably slightly higher with this release (which I know will please some of you who preferred the super-hard difficulty of the early versions!), but hopefully balances the early parts of the game better with the later parts of the game (which I think could be a little easy before, especially due to the Aspect powers).